For Melissa Rivers, returning to the red carpet is less about reliving the past than reclaiming a particular kind of entertainment.
Nearly two decades after she last covered awards-season arrivals alongside her late mother, comedy legend Joan Rivers, Melissa is preparing to step back in front of the cameras. Her mission is straightforward: make the red carpet fun again.
Rivers will join Variety co-president and co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh and CNN correspondent Elizabeth Wagmeister for “CNN & Variety Red Carpet Live: TV’s Biggest Night,” the joint pre-show broadcast ahead of the Emmys. The program is scheduled to stream live beginning at 5 p.m. ET on Monday, Sept. 14, on CNN.com/Watch and through the CNN app for CNN’s streaming subscribers.
For Rivers, the invitation came almost unexpectedly.
“I was originally supposed to join in via Zoom, and do some color — some fun,” she recalled. But during Labor Day weekend, she received a call asking whether she would be interested in appearing on the carpet itself.
“Without really thinking about it, I said ‘Sure.’”
The reality of that decision hit her about 10 minutes later.
“Oh my God!” Rivers remembered thinking. “Suddenly, it dawned on me, I haven’t stood on a red carpet for coverage in 20 years.”
That realization brought excitement, nerves and an enormous amount of preparation.
A familiar world, with a different mission
Rivers knows the red carpet better than most. She and Joan Rivers became synonymous with awards-show fashion coverage during their years reporting for E! and the TV Guide Channel. Their partnership brought irreverence, blunt fashion opinions and comedy to a format that often leaned heavily toward polished celebrity promotion.
But in 2007, their association with red-carpet coverage came to an end. Four years later, Joan Rivers made her position clear.
“We’ve done that. It’s not fun anymore,” she declared in 2011.
Melissa Rivers agrees with her mother’s assessment — at least about the way the format had evolved.
“The fun has been gone. The lightness has been gone,” she said.
Yet she does not intend to recreate the old Rivers family act. Instead, she sees her return as an opportunity to occupy a different space.
“It’s not going to be the same as me and my mom; it’s never going to be that again,” Rivers said. “But there’s a whole new lane for just being fun and lightening up.”
Her approach is deliberately uncomplicated.
“I’m going to be the shallow end of the pool,” she explained. “Don’t come to me if you’re going to want to make statements. I want to know who you’re wearing, and fun stuff.”
That includes the questions that can make a celebrity interview feel less rehearsed — such as whether an actor expected a nomination and was overlooked, or whether a famous couple spends more time preparing for an awards show than anyone would imagine.
Rivers joked about the difficulty of coordinating fittings, recalling her own wedding preparations.
“For my wedding, trying to get my husband, my son, and his two sons coordinated for a fitting, it might as well have been D-Day,” she said.
From fashion commentary to cultural commentary
The red carpet has changed significantly since Rivers and her mother dominated the format.
Celebrity fashion coverage has increasingly become intertwined with politics, social movements, activism and broader cultural conversations. Rivers points to the 2018 Golden Globes, when women wore black as part of a coordinated protest against sexual harassment and inequality, as a defining moment.
“That would have been the greatest ‘Fashion Police’ ever,” she said.
For Rivers, the black gowns worked because there was a clear collective theme while still allowing individual personalities to emerge.
But she believes the broader awards-season conversation subsequently became much more serious.
“The world has become so much more serious in the last 20 years,” she said, citing social reckonings and the political landscape.
Her answer is not that those conversations should disappear. Rather, she wants entertainment coverage to have room for something else.
“The world is going to hell in a handbag,” Rivers said. “But let’s call it what it is. It’s a bunch of beautiful, talented, successful people, walking into a building to see if they won something.”
For Rivers, part of the appeal of the red carpet has always been its ability to provide an escape.
She remembers the philosophy behind her mother's approach: viewers watching at home were not necessarily admiring every outfit.
“As my mom used to say, when you sat on your couch at home, you didn’t say everybody looked wonderful,” Rivers said. “We were just giving voice to that.”
That willingness to be candid was central to the appeal of “Fashion Police,” which Melissa continued to host after her mother's death in 2014 until the program ended in 2017.
Zendaya, Jean Smart and the fashion stakes
Rivers already has several celebrities on her radar.
She singled out Keri Russell for consistently strong red-carpet appearances and praised Jean Smart for balancing glamour with appropriateness.
Then there is Zendaya.
“Zendaya — okay, we’re all running for number two,” Rivers said. “It’s almost like, ‘Why bother?’”
Her comments about Smart extend beyond fashion.
Smart’s Emmy-nominated performance as Deborah Vance in “Hacks” has prompted comparisons to Joan Rivers, with many viewers seeing echoes of the late comedian in the character.
For Melissa, the resemblance is not difficult to understand — and she is particularly pleased by the casting.
“My mother would be so happy that if there was anyone playing someone lightly based on her, that it was Jean Smart,” she said.
Rivers noted Smart's talent, elegance and appearance, recalling that her mother once joked that Cate Blanchett would portray her in a film.
“She got Jean Smart, which would thrill her to death,” Rivers said.
The emotional connection becomes more complicated when “Hacks” turns toward its mother-daughter storyline.
Rivers acknowledged that she has not watched enough of the series to offer a detailed assessment of the show's depiction of the relationship. She also admitted that seeing fictionalized versions of her family dynamics can be difficult.
“When someone snuck me the pilot, I was not thrilled by how I was portrayed,” she said.
Still, she appreciates the show's depiction of a relationship changing over time.
“Do I think where my character started was accurate? No,” Rivers said. “Do I love the fact that they portrayed evolution — which is a true theme between mothers and daughters? I love that.”
What would Joan Rivers say about today's red carpet?
Few subjects illustrate how much celebrity culture has changed more clearly than cosmetic procedures and weight-loss drugs.
Rivers believes her mother would have had plenty to say about today's far more open discussion of cosmetic work and the rise of medications such as Ozempic.
“I think she would say, ‘Thank God — everybody’s caught up! And admitting it!’” Rivers said.
She recalled that celebrity scrutiny once involved trying to detect evidence of cosmetic procedures without the subject acknowledging them.
“Back in the day, we would be looking behind people’s ears for fresh scars,” she said.
Today, she sees a much more open attitude.
“Now, everyone’s like, ‘Look what I’ve done!’”
It is a perfect example of the kind of conversation Rivers appears ready to have when she returns: candid, humorous and rooted in the culture surrounding celebrity rather than simply the celebrities themselves.
A return she never expected
Despite her enthusiasm, Rivers insists that this comeback was never part of a carefully constructed career plan.
In fact, only weeks ago, she says she would have dismissed the possibility entirely.
“I was never planning on this,” she said. “If you had asked me two weeks ago, ‘Would I ever go back?’, I would say no.”
Her decision to say yes so quickly surprised even her.
And yet, beneath the nerves and preparation, Rivers seems genuinely excited by the prospect.
She and her mother eventually walked away from awards-show reporting because they felt the work had lost its appeal.
“We chose to walk away because… It’s like anything — you show up and you kind of don’t care,” Rivers explained. “That was when my mom and I had the conversation. We both came to it separately that it was time to walk away.”
This time, she is coming back with a different purpose.
“I hate making this more serious than it is,” Rivers said. “I have a goal, which is to make it fun again.”
Then she summed up her return with the kind of straightforward declaration that would have been familiar to anyone who watched her work with her mother:
“I’m going on my own personal campaign to bring fun back.”